


Sky Painted Pink

by Em_Jaye



Series: Sparks of Light [3]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Cunnilingus, F/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Smut, Time Travel, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:08:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24323323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em_Jaye/pseuds/Em_Jaye
Summary: The world doesn’t end in fire or flood or weather disasters spurred on by global warming. It ends with a snap on an afternoon in late April.
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers
Series: Sparks of Light [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1696234
Comments: 58
Kudos: 253





	Sky Painted Pink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grimeysociety](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grimeysociety/gifts).



> Again I go forth, attempting to fix canon with every fic I write. 
> 
> I'm gifting this one to grimey because she's the brilliant wordsmith that said just the right combination of words to turn this from a blob of an idea in my brain to a fully-formed fic. And because she's lovely.

The world doesn’t end in fire or flood or weather disasters spurred on by global warming. It ends with a snap on an afternoon in late April.

Darcy doesn’t hear the snap, though.

In Darcy’s world, thousands of miles away, the world ends with a soft, confusing _crunch_. It’s not a crash or an explosion. It’s the sound of a car drifting, driverless, into another car in the employee parking lot.

Her students are taking a test at their workstations. She’s the only one who catches the red SUV—it’s Andrea’s, who teaches upper level math, if she’s not mistaken—that had been pulling out of its space glide forward three more spaces and come to a stop. Crunched into the trunk of Vice Principal Canedo’s coupe.

She gets up and squints in the afternoon sunlight. Her head tilts to one side, waiting for the driver’s side door to open, for Andrea to get out and assess the damage. For some kind of explanation as to what had just happened and why.

And then the screaming starts.

By the time it’s finished, half her class, half the school, half the _world_ is gone. 

The day everyone disappears isn’t the worst day. She thought it would have been—maybe _should_ have been—but in hindsight, it’s the easiest. That day, at least, she has something to do. She has students to hug and try to soothe. She has screaming to stop, hysteria to disrupt. She has people to help. Friends to check on.

That day, she has things to do.

It’s all the days after that are the bad days. The days when everybody _stays_ gone.

When there’s no phones and no internet and no government that knows what to do and no one to listen to and no one to lead.

When the screaming stops—really, _really_ stops—and the unearthly silence descends. When the idea first hits the air that this may be something that can’t be fixed. That this just might be how life is now.

That’s the worst day. The day the hope dissolves into the breeze like everything else.

She tries not to think about how her phone isn’t ringing. Not just for the first two weeks, when everything is on fire and no one’s phone is ringing. But the days after—when communications have been mostly restored.

Her phone works. She tries it.

Jane doesn’t answer.

Erik doesn’t answer.

She helps at first. She goes out every morning and she helps push wrecked cars off the road, or coaxes scared kids out of their homes to usher them to the shelters the churches have set up. She hears it’s worse in the cities—it’s much worse, according to some—but in this little beachside town, where everyone knows each other and everyone checks on one another enough to know just how many they’re missing, it feels bad enough. She doesn’t want to think about what it’s like in the cities.

There are only a few friends from college she still talks to. Of the three of them, two never answer. She thinks all three are gone at first, but Mara texts her saying she’s okay but her four-year-old son has been missing for fifteen days. That’s how Darcy learns that it’s been fifteen days since the world ended.

She doesn’t know what to say to Mara, other than she’s sorry (because she is; she’s so sorry) and they leave it at that.

The black stick phone sits on her coffee table. She hasn’t turned it on since it came in the mail and she saw the single contact saved with Steve’s new number. That was back at the beginning of March. When she looks at the calendar, it’s time to switch it to May and admit that it’s been six months since she saw him. Six months since the closest he could get was Mexico City, so she’d driven twelve hours in the rain so they could spend exactly twenty-five hours together in a muggy, dim motel room.

In the hours before they had to leave, when they were locked together beneath the thin and scratchy sheets, he’d warned her that he was going to have to disappear soon. Really disappear. There had been too many close calls recently, he had said while his fingers drew slow, measured strokes up and down her back. He wouldn’t be able to visit or check in until he was sure he wasn’t putting her in danger—and he didn’t know how long that would be.

It’s seventeen days since the world ended that she first hears the name _Thanos_ and any hint of what happened starts to filter into her periphery. There’s still no internet and she doesn’t have cable, so she gets the news in snippets from conversations she overhears and tries to piece it together herself.

Monsters.

Aliens.

A battle in Africa.

A lunatic with all the power in the universe.

She knows it’s coming, but it doesn’t stop her heart from seizing when she firsts hears David, her neighbor, talking to his father and the word _Avengers_ rings like a bell in the middle of his sentence.

David notices her at the edge of her walkway on his way back inside, his elderly father having gone ahead inside. “Darcy,” he says, catching her attention. “ _Estas bien_?”

She looks up, realizing she’d been stuck staring at her garbage bags on the curb. She’d been trying to figure out what to do with her trash—nothing has been picked up in two weeks. She blinks and shakes her head. “ _Que sobre los Avengers_?” she asks without bothering to hide that she’s been eavesdropping.

David shrugs. “ _En Wakanda_ ,” he says. “ _Con Thanos—hubo una guerra_.” He speaks slowly for her benefit—he knows she’s still not nearly as fluent as she would like to be.

“ _Si_ ,” she says with a nod. “ _Y…los Avengers_?” she prompts, her heart inconveniently high in her throat. “ _Que sobre ellos? Adonde estan ellos?_ ”

Another shrug. “ _Creo que estan muertos_.”

Everything inside of Darcy shudders to a stop. She doesn’t know how she pulls in enough of her next breath to ask, “All of them?”

He studies her for a moment before his lips dip into a deeper frown. He looks much older than thirty. “ _No se_ ,” he says finally. “ _Lo siento, Darcy. Tal vez no todos_.”

She doesn’t know how long she stands there, trash bag in hand, before she hears his door squeak shut. She doesn’t even know if he said anything else, or how long he waited for her to speak before he gave up and went back inside.

The stick phone hasn’t moved from its place on the coffee table, but it seems like it’s taking up more room by the time she gets inside. She stands over it. Picks it up.

“I’m telling you this because I love you,” Steve had said back in November. The words rumbled beneath her ear. “But I know this isn’t…easy for you.” She’d waited for him to keep going, already knowing what he was going to say. “I understand if—”

“Shut up,” she’d said and turned her head to place a kiss to the center of his chest.

“Darcy…” he had said her name around a heavy sigh when she rolled onto her stomach and dropped her chin where her kiss had just landed. “You shouldn’t put your life on hold—”

She’d told him she wasn’t. Made some joke about how he was just an occasional booty call and how she had a wife and two kids he didn’t know about. Made him laugh until he kissed her and pulled her on top of him and they both forgot what he was going to say for another hour. And she’d wanted to tell him then—tell him that she loved him, that she’s loved him since the first time he turned her face to his and kissed her inside that stupid dinosaur. But the words had stayed on her tongue just like every time before, dissolving like sugar and tasting too much like goodbye to make it to her lips.

The phone is heavy in her hand.

She sees the way her thumb trembles while it hovers over the power button. The only thing standing between her and knowing for sure if Steve is still alive.

She tries but she can’t bring herself to turn it on.

She can’t know for sure. It’s stupid—everything inside her, every logical molecule in her brain is telling her that knowing for sure either way is better than wondering.

But she still doesn’t turn it on because right now there’s still a chance that he’s okay. That’s he’s trying to fix this. That’s he’s not dead.

She needs that chance—that hope. She needs to hold onto it a little bit longer.

It’s twenty-three days since the world ends when she gets her answer. She sleeps in later than usual—not that it matters because things like schedules and timelines and deadlines were among the second wave of casualties. She tries her phone out of habit. Still no wi-fi. No data network.

No calls.

Her shower is quick and perfunctory. She drags on a pair of shorts and a baggy t-shirt, opens the door of her house, and screams.

Steve is standing on her front step, one hand raised like he was about to knock.

For a second, neither of them move. She’s afraid to breathe, afraid to blink in case this isn’t real and she’s still asleep.

“Darcy,” he breathes out in a rush of relief. He’s clutching the doorframe like he’s holding himself up. Or holding himself back from rushing inside.

“You shaved,” she says. She doesn’t know why she says it, but the sight of him cleanshaven feels like more of a shock than the sight of him alive, in front of her, after so many months. “And—” she finds her voice again. “You’re not—”

She doesn’t want to say it. To admit that she’s been thinking it for days that felt like months. That she’d almost convinced herself it was true before she had any proof.

Steve steps over the threshold and drops his hands to her shoulders. “You’re okay.” His grip tightens on her shoulders. His fingers are digging in almost painfully. “You’re—” he keeps her at arms-length for one, long moment before he envelopes her and she stumbles backward, pulling him inside with her as she pushes the door shut.

It takes his arms folding entirely around her, her face crashing into his chest, before the spell breaks and she takes a breath. She feels him bury his face in her hair and the warmth of his breath on her skin is enough to blur her vision as her arms go around his neck.

“You’re okay,” he says again, and his hands move to her back to her arms, then up to her shoulders, and finally he pulls back, holding her face, locking his eyes with hers. “God, I didn’t—” he leans in and kisses her forehead.

“I thought you were dead,” she chokes. Without warning tears rise and crash down her cheeks. “Steve,” his name is barely a whisper as she covers his hands with hers and says it again. “Steve, I thought you were dead.”

“I’m here,” he says, and her eyes fall closed when he tilts her face up and kisses her eyelids and nose and cheeks and finally, his lips meet hers. She feels something crack in her chest and she breaks the kiss too soon with a sob of relief, almost lightheaded with how it’s coursing, raging suddenly though her veins. “It’s okay,” Steve says, kissing at the tears fresh on her cheeks before he tucks his face into the crook of her neck. “I’m here.” He’s sealing the words against her as his lips claim every bit of skin he can reach.

There are a million questions she wants to ask about what happened, about who is left, about why and how he’s here, but she can’t ask them now. She can’t think about anything other than the solid warmth of Steve beneath her hands, of his lips on her neck and the top of her shoulder, of his palms and fingers spanning the width of her back and moving down to clutch her hips. They can talk later, she tells herself, moving backward into her living room, dragging him with her until they crash onto her couch together.

Her tears have stopped as she tugs her shirt over her head without preamble. She pushes his up and off a moment before she takes hold of his face again and pulls his lips back to hers. He lets out a soft moan when she rakes her nails down his back and his hands drop to her hips, shifting her so she’s beneath him, his thigh wedged between hers.

There’s none of the playful teasing or shy laughter that usually slips between them. This is rough and desperate, and she can feel the slight tremble in Steve’s hands when he helps her kick away the rest of her clothes. But she groans and arches into him, kissing him hard and letting her teeth scrape down his neck and sink into his shoulder. She needs him to be rough so she can feel something other than the terror and the hopelessness she’s been drowning in for twenty-three days. She needs to lose a piece of herself inside of him, to claim some part of him in return, so she never has to feel this kind of loneliness again.

She shoves his pants halfway down his legs, enough to free his cock, and strokes him eagerly. Steve groans again and grabs a handful of her hair, pulling her head back from where she was sucking a kiss on his neck, so he can push his fingers between her lips. Darcy moans around them as a rush of heat floods her and she sucks greedily, dragging her tongue beneath his fingertips. Steve’s pupils are blown, his cheeks are flushed, and his lips are pink and wet. She hardly has time to miss his fingers when he pulls them out, his lips crash to hers again and he sucks her tongue into his mouth, swallowing the sounds she’s making when his fingers slide between her folds and he finds her hot and wet and desperate for more.

With one hard thrust of his hips he’s inside her, moving hard and fast. His fingers stay between them, boring down on her clit with each snap of his hips. Her head falls back when she breaks away from his kiss for a gulp of air, her wet hair already a tangled mess at the back of her skull. She tries to roll her hips against his hand but he’s trapped her between the couch and his weight and she can’t do anything but take his relentless thrusts and claw at his back, mewling like a pornstar each time he slams into her. 

Steve kisses her again, a wet clash of tongues and teeth that has her moaning the second before she comes hard and fast, her orgasm flooding her body like a jolt of electricity. She hears him hum appreciatively at the way every part of her clenches and tightens around him as he frees his hand from between their bodies and grips her hips tightly while he chases his own release. He finds it a minute later, coming with his eyes open and locked on hers with their ragged breathing the only sound in the room.

He pulls out and gives her space to sit up, though she doesn’t trust her still-trembling thighs to support her if she tries to stand. Steve tucks himself away and zips his pants back up, about to turn and collect their clothes when he looks at her and his expression softens. He sits back down and holds her face with one hand, brushing his thumb across her cheek. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

She shakes her head. He did, a little, but it was just what she wanted, what she _needed_ to shove reality away for a few minutes. And now that the rush has faded—

She has things she wants to ask, things she needs to know, but the only question that wants to form on her lips is _How long can you stay?_ But the thought of asking him that, of him saying that he only came to make sure she was alive, that he has to leave again—

Instead of asking anything, she forces a small smile and pushes down the tears that want to rise again in her throat. “I’m just glad you’re here,” she says quietly. “I missed you.”

Steve’s lips twitch to mirror her sad half-smile and his finger curl against the back of her neck, pulling her forward to press a kiss to her forehead. “I missed you, too.”

Darcy doesn’t know what they do all day. Steve tells her what happened—first in Wakanda, and then the Garden—she knows he doesn’t want to have to give her the details, but she asks for them anyway. She’s spent twenty-three days in the dark, she has to remind him. She has to know.

Her account of the last twenty-three days is harder to get through. She tells him about the kids in her class—the ones who crumbled in front of her eyes and the ones who were left shell-shocked and screaming. About the car accidents, the plane that crashed a few miles outside of town; the temporary shelters, the babies crying for parents that disappeared. She stops herself before she can get to the suicides—at least two that she knows about—people who raced home to find their entire families reduced to a pile of ash. Steve looks grim enough, she can’t bring herself to add more victims to his already overburdened guilt.

She knows that doesn’t take all day, but she can’t account for the hours that slip by without her notice. They lay on her couch and watch Disney movies she’s seen a million times but that are new to Steve. From where her head is resting on his lap, she can hear him laugh softly at all the silly jokes made for kids. It’s a surprising sound, but between that and the way his hand is combing absently through her hair, it’s more comfort than she’s felt in weeks.

It’s dark by the time she cooks the pizzas she’s been keeping at the back of her freezer. They taste more like cardboard than crust, but she doesn’t care, and Steve doesn’t seem to mind.

He’s brushing his teeth while she’s turning off lights in the living room. She can hear the water running in the bathroom as she listlessly tosses throw-pillows back on the couch and stops short when her foot brushes something on the floor.

“Are you coming to—” Steve’s voice pulls her attention up to where he’s standing in the doorway. She’s made it as far as the hallway outside her bedroom in a daze. She doesn’t even realize she’s crying until she sees how his face drops and he crosses the room in a few steps. “Hey,” he says softly, taking gentle hold of her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

The tears are streaming now, burning her eyes and stinging her nose and the back of her throat. Her fingers curl painfully around the black stick phone she’s picked up and finally been able to bring herself to turn on. “Did you try to call me?”

“Darcy—”

“I should have turned it on,” she blurts out. “I’m so sorry I didn’t. I should have called you—” she says, her breath growing short as the realization hits her that Steve might be doing something else, being of more use to someone else, if he hadn’t had to come all the way to Mexico to see her in person. “I should have let you know that I was okay—” She feels sick and selfish while all her stupid reasoning and rationalizations crush into her, stacking up on her chest and making it harder to breathe. “I just—I just thought if I called you and you didn’t pick up it would mean…”

“Darcy, stop,” he says firmly, grasping her shoulders more tightly.

But she’s shaking her head. She can’t stop. She doesn’t think she’s going to be able to breathe again until she says it all out loud. “No, it would have meant that you were dead too—you were dead like everyone else—and you would have died thinking I didn’t—” she cuts herself off with a sharp inhale that turns into a painful hiccough. “You would have been dust like the rest of the world and you—you would have thought I didn’t love you because I never told you and—”

“ _Darcy_ ,” he says sharply and gives her a shake. The phone falls from her hand and clatters to the ground. He stoops so he’s looking her squarely in the eye. “Stop. I don’t…” His lips press into a firm line. “I wouldn’t have thought that.” He waits until she can take a short breath in before his voice and his expression soften again. “I’ve never thought that. You don’t have to apologize…” he purses his lips again. “You don’t have to say anything, okay?”

“No, I do,” she insists. “I do because I love you, Steve.” Another wave of tears crash down her cheeks. “I love you so much it scares me, but I should have been brave enough to tell you anyway and I’m so sorry that I—”

His lips on hers is the only thing that derails her thinking and the flow of words lining up to tumble out of her mouth. His arms go around her and pull her up in a tight embrace that makes her toes brush the ground as her arms wind around his neck. “I love you too,” he echoes, turning them so he can move them both back into the bedroom. She’s still clinging to him, her face in his neck, her hands petting his hair, when he sits her down on the edge of her bed, kneeling in front of her to keep them at the same level. “Come on,” he says softly, kissing her cheek, her temple as he pushes back her hair. “We’re okay,” he says around a light kiss to her ear, sounding like he’s reminding himself as much as he’s telling her. “We’re together. It’s okay.”

She nods, trying to get a hold of herself. She can breathe again but doesn’t know what it’s going to take to make herself stop crying. “I know you can’t—” she keeps her forehead pressed to his neck, her red eyes focused on the collar of his t-shirt. “I know you can’t stay here but…”

Steve pulls back a little, forcing her to look at him again. “But what?”

Darcy purses her lips, trying to fight another sob. “I just—” She keeps shaking her head. “I don’t think I can be alone anymore,” she admits before her face crumples and she gives into the sob that had been sitting hot and unforgiving in the back of her throat.

It feels like admitting defeat after spending so long priding herself on her independence. After so much time blissfully on her own, the thought of waking up alone again shouldn’t terrify her, but it does. The thought of Steve leaving tomorrow or the day after, of continuing this arrangement where she never knows where he is or if she’s ever going to see him again, after everything that’s happened, opens something so deep and dark inside of her that threatens to swallow her whole if she gets too close.

“You’re not,” Steve says before she can try to get a hold of herself. “You won’t be. I promise.” He kisses her cheeks again before placing a soft, gentle kiss on her lips. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”

His lips meet hers again and again and she nods, believing him. Maybe he can’t stay, but she can go. The life she was building, her job, her friends, all the things and people she really loves here are gone. Faded into the wind along with half the universe. No one needs her here. And maybe no one needs her where Steve would take her, but at least they’d be together. She might even be of use.

But she can think about that later. Steve is still kissing her, the hand that was holding her face slides slowly down her neck while her lips part for his. The desperation from before is gone, but the hunger she can taste in his kiss is just as strong as ever. She feels herself melting quickly into him, wanting something more than that panicked, frenzied fuck on the couch. His hands move deftly over her breasts before he slips beneath her t-shirt and flattens his hands over her bare back.

Darcy lets him undress her this time. Slowly, with his hands chasing each piece of clothing with a soft, teasing touch. He covers her with kisses that trail over her shoulders and collarbone to the valley between her breasts and down her stomach when he pushes her to lie back and slides her shorts and panties to the floor. He kisses his way down her thighs, over the scars and freckles on her knees and the birth mark on her left ankle before he hooks his hands at the backs of her knees and pushes her legs apart.

She props herself up on her elbows to meet his eyes when he looks up from between her legs. He holds her gaze, a contest of who will blink first while she tries not to squirm. It’s a contest he wins when his tongue slides inside her and her head falls back between her shoulder blades. He circles her clit slowly, deliberately before he flattens his tongue again, lapping at her greedily with a moan of satisfaction that rumbles in his chest.

Darcy smothers her own moan between her lips and rocks her hips against his tongue. She reaches out a hand to thread into his hair and is rewarded when he pulls her in closer, throwing her legs over his shoulders while he thrusts his tongue into her again. Her back bows off the bed and her nails scrap his scalp. Her mouth falls open as she watches him, his eyes closed while he tilts his head and sucks at her throbbing clit, the sounds he’s making muffle against her like she’s the best thing he’s ever tasted.

One of his large, calloused hands spreads wide enough to hold her hips steady while two fingers of his other hand push into her. He sucks hard on her clit until she’s arching off the bed again, coming with a rush, clenching on his fingers, and curling her hands in his hair to hold him against her until she’s ridden it out.

He’s a little quicker to discard his own clothes and as she’s blinking the world back into focus, he’s crawling up the bed, dragging her with him until they’re face to face again, her head on her pillows. She reaches between them and strokes his cock, circling her thumb along the tip, smiling against his lips when his hips jolt into her hand.

His tongue slides between her lips, circling hers as he thrusts into her, rocking experimentally until their hips are flush and Steve is swallowing her sigh of relief. She opens her eyes when he pulls back from the kiss and pins their foreheads together. He shifts his hips and pulls out at the same time, keeping their gaze locked when he pushes in again.

There’s a look he gives her when he’s surrounded her like this that she’s never seen anywhere else. Some kind of reverence in his eyes when they’re locked together with his arms caged around her. Like he’s trying to memorize everything about her, every expression and breathy moan he can pull from her parted lips.

She threads one hand into his hair again while the other holds his face. Her thumb swipes over his pink lips. “You’re mine,” she whispers before she can stop herself.

He smiles softly and leans in to kiss her again; a long, slow kiss to match the next deep thrust of his hips. “Always have been,” he says, his voice is soft and husky and cuts right through her.

Sometime in the middle of the night, when they’re sticky with sweat and Darcy has collapsed, boneless and wrung-out with pleasure on top of him, she asks, “What will you do?”

Steve blinks, looking half-dazed as he pushes his fingers through her hair and away from her face. “When?”

“When we fix it,” she says softly. “What will you do when this is all behind us?”

His lips dip into a thoughtful frown. “I don’t know that we can fix this,” he says. “I mean…we tried, but—”

“You didn’t have me last time you tried,” she reminds him. “Which means you haven’t tried everything yet.” She gives him a sleepy grin. “Who knows,” she adds, dropping her chin onto his chest. “I could be the best thing to happen to you in this wild endeavor.”

Steve’s frown melts into a soft smile. “You already are.”

She pushes herself up on her arms and drops a kiss on his lips. “So,” she says, sinking back down to rest her ear on his chest, right over his heart. “What are you going to do? When we fix this.”

She doesn’t know if they can fix this. She doesn’t know if she’ll have anything to contribute to the solution or what the solution could possibly be. But for the first time since she heard the crunch of Andrea’s car drift into a collision, she feels like maybe the world is quite over just yet.

***

The world doesn’t end in fire or flood or weather disasters spurred on by global warming. On a sunny afternoon in early April, it doesn’t end at all.

Darcy watches her students take their tests. She reminds Paola and Inez that their whispered conversation needs to wait until after class. She supervises Mirabel’s last class of the day, sacrificing her own prep period so her friend can make her doctor’s appointment.

Nothing feels different or out of place. There’s nothing to suggest that she lived a different, horrible version of this day before. That she lived and worked around the clock for almost a year with the people who were able to build something that would turn the clock back and do the battle in Wakanda over again, retaining their own memories but erasing everyone else’s.

For Darcy, it’s just another Thursday.

It’s not until the next night, when she’s just coming home from dinner with her friends, that she gets an alert on her phone for a slew of new articles mentioning the Avengers. News of the attack on New York has finally reached her two days later, with patchwork reporting on a similar event in Wakanda and next-to-no information for a week after that.

But the following Friday, Darcy watches with a slow smile spreading over her face as Thaddeus Ross—looking like he’d rather be chewing on glass—issues a public apology to Wanda Maximoff, Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff, James Barnes, and Steve Rogers and assures that when they want to come home, they will be welcome and free from persecution.

That night, just like most clear nights, Darcy goes to the beach to watch the sunset.

She thinks maybe she ought to be surprised to see him there, sitting in her usual spot, outlined against the sparkling water, but she isn’t.

She tells him she’s missed him when he sweeps her up in his arms. She wants to tell him that she loves him. She wants to hear the whole story—Thanos, Wakanda, Ross, all of it.

But she doesn’t ask. Not just yet.

Because for the moment, Steve’s arms are around her and the world is painted pink and orange and smells like sunshine and salt.

And for once, she and Steve have all the time in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Translation of Darcy and David's conversation if you need it: 
> 
> "Are you okay?"  
> "What about the Avengers?"  
> "In Wakanda...there was a war with Thanos."  
> "Yes...and the Avengers? What about them? Where are they?"  
> "I think they're dead"  
> "All of them?"  
> "I don't know. I'm sorry Darcy...maybe not all of them."
> 
> Thanks for joining me in this little series, friendships! Hope you had as much smutty fun as I did ;-)


End file.
